ATTLEBORO — Joyce Dexter and her niece Eileen Williams represent both sides of this story.

The Taunton women worked at Texas Instruments in the 1970s, each for around five or six years.

Both women are cancer survivors. Both filed claims under the Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act.

Dexter and Williams are among thousands of workers exposed to radiation while working at the former TI facility in Attleboro, where contracted work on nuclear projects for the federal government tainted a massive campus surrounded by homes and small businesses.

Dexter’s claim was approved. She received compensation.

Williams’ claim was rejected. She’s examining her options.

Both women returned to the scene of their alleged exposure Wednesday as Division of Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Director Rachel P. Leiton hosted a meeting to notify current and former nuclear weapons employees who worked at 33 facilities in southern New England covered by the EEOICPA.

“We’re sitting here, getting information about the cancer we got in the same building that gave us the cancer,” Williams said, acknowledging a certain irony in the meeting’s location. “That’s what the lady beside me kept saying. I told her I supposed they cleaned it up.”

The TI facility spread throughout 18 buildings on about 100 acres along Forest Street in Attleboro.

“Operations with radioactive materials began at the site in 1952 when Metals and Controls Inc. began to fabricate enriched uranium foils,” according to a 1997 background summary drafted by L. Joseph Callan, executive director for operations for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Metals and Controls Inc. merged with TI in 1959 and eventually was operated as a corporate division of TI. From 1952 through 1965, Metals and Controls (and later TI), under a variety of government contracts, fabricated enriched uranium fuel elements for the U.S. Naval Reactors Program, Air Force, other U.S. government-funded research, and a few commercial customers.”

Most of the campus has been cleared of radiation and toxins, according to the federal officials, and what was once known as Building Two has been converted into a Bristol Community College campus. Wednesday’s meeting was held in a small BCC auditorium in the same building that once housed TI’s employee cafeteria.

Dexter survived a bout with breast cancer. Her claim passed with no problems and she received compensation.

Her niece, on the other hand, has been diagnosed with multiple cancers since 1995.

“I’ve had 16 surgeries,” Williams said, adding that many of the operations removed carcinomas doctors feared would spread quickly. “But none of them fell into the right category. Apparently, if I wanted compensation, I shouldn’t have had the surgery that prevented the cancer from spreading. I’ve actually had three doctors ask me if I was ever exposed to large doses of radiation.”

Page 2 of 3 - Williams’ experience represents anecdotes shared by several meeting attendees on Wednesday. Some former TI workers have been incredibly frustrated by the formulas for compensation and some of the seemingly arbitrary guidelines governing who qualifies for benefits and who doesn’t.

“People were disgusted,” said Ray Trottier, a 35-year TI employee from Lincoln, Rhode Island. “That’s why they just started leaving.”

Trottier, a former TI facilities maintenance supervisor and senior technician, said he was diagnosed with a rare type of cancer he can’t blame on genetics. He said he regularly handled toxic substances on the job.

“I’ve ingested, inhaled and I’ve laid in the stuff,” he told the packed room, before attendees started filing out. “I developed this rare cancer. I got denied ...

“I find this very frustrating.”

The program provides up to $150,000 in compensation in addition to medical benefits for 22 specified types of cancers. Employees may be eligible for compensation if a dose reconstruction test proves, within a certain threshold of probability, that exposure at work likely caused the cancer. Applicants also had to have worked at least 250 days during specified years of operation.

So far, $65.7 million in EEOICPA compensation and medical benefits has been paid out to 722 people living in Massachusetts, $26.8 million to 250 Connecticut workers, and $11 million to 102 Rhode Island men and women, according to Leiton. About $10.4 billion has been distributed nationwide.

Wednesday’s meeting mirrored a gathering one year earlier, also held at the former Metals and Controls site.

“We believe there are many current and former nuclear weapons workers living in southern New England who are eligible for monetary compensation and medical benefits, but who have yet to file a claim,” Leiton said in a press release announcing the meeting. “Our goal is to inform these individuals about the program and to assist them with obtaining the compensation and medical benefits to which they are entitled.”

Counselors were on hand to assist applicants with claims. An ombudsman was on site to deal with complaints.

Larry Darcey of Rehoboth has been polling his former colleagues and employees since he discovered EEOICPA. He ended his career with TI as the Attleboro site’s global IT director, reporting directly to the head of the facility.

Over the past several years, the 40-year TI employee has reached out to and heard back from more than 200 ailing coworkers. He estimates those in the region who were potentially exposed to cancer-causing levels of radiation at TI could number in the tens of thousands.

He posed a series of tough questions to Leiton and Thomas P. Tomes, a health physicist with the Office of Compensation Analysis and Support, with the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, a division of the CDC.

Page 3 of 3 - Darcey got few answers. He’s been living with cancer for years. Now he seeks out those he once worked beside, who may not know about the compensation benefits available to those who qualify. He’s also questioning how far the radiation at the TI site could have spread.

And Darcey would like to know why, if at least one building on the campus is still unoccupied and was deemed too hazardous to occupy as recently as 2008 by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, do all benefits terminate for workers who started at the site after 1997 (the year TI and the federal government terminated nuclear work contracts).

To Darcey’s questions, and many other queries offered by admittedly frustrated attendees, Leiton offered what became a familiar refrain throughout meeting.

“Unfortunately, that’s the way the law was written,” she said more than a dozen times.

No master list of employees exists, and several attendees only discovered the compensation program in the past few days.

Some applicants for compensation have had difficulty proving they worked at the facility.

Joe Pimento of Dighton still possesses a tiny scrap torn from an employee newsletter, his only proof he was an employee. That was one of the only twists of luck that kept his application alive.

Dexter still had her TI workers’ badge. She took it out of her purse after the meeting. Her headshot, preserved on the pass, small and square, in black and white, shows a young woman with dark hair. The photograph was taken long before Dexter discovered the first signs of breast cancer.

She didn’t feel comfortable sharing the exact amount of her compensation package.

“It’s gone now,” she said. “I spread it among my family. I can’t take it with me.”

No one knows how many former TI workers have died as a result of their exposure to radiation at Texas Instruments’ Attleboro facility. Some survivors of deceased former workers also qualify for EEOICPA benefits.

Leiton urges anyone who fears they may be eligible for compensation to contact their New York Resource Center at 800-941-3943.